The release of Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back over the 2021 Thanksgiving holiday weekend brought about a series of new perspectives on the Beatles. For the first time, the average fan was given a look into the Beatles’ exclusive studio activities. We got to see how the Beatles wrote their songs, what the different interpersonal dynamics were like, what they wore in their everyday lives, how often they apparently showered, what kinds of things they ate and drank, and a number of other quaint, personal behaviors. It was incredibly humanizing and showed that some things were clearly a bit more nuanced than popular history might have us believe, and others were, apparently, blatantly wrong. It also awakened a new avenue for analysis in the study of Beatles history, which was until recently beginning to grow stagnant.
One popular theory among the older generation of Beatles fans is that Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s eccentric avant-garde artist girlfriend (and later wife) caused the breakup of the band. Get Back, however, paints a different picture of Yoko. Throughout the eight-hour, three-part documentary, she spent much of her time reading, knitting, sewing, eating her lunch, and listening to the band talk and rehearse. When she did speak, it was usually very quietly and politely. Only once or twice did she verge on screaming, and that was in the context of a jam session in which she is a vocalist. Paul McCartney’s fiancée Linda Eastman was also present, and she took on a much more active (though still not antagonistic) role than Yoko, photographing the band in the studio and joining in during conversations about the band’s plans for their January 1969 project. When George Harrison briefly quit the band during the recording of this documentary, it wasn’t because of anything Yoko (or Linda, for that matter) said or did. It was because he was tired of Paul and John talking over him and ignoring his creative input. Yoko was just as taken aback by his departure as the rest of them.
Also in 2021, two books examining the Beatles through the lens of women’s history were published: A Women’s History of the Beatles by Christine Feldman-Barrett, a professor of sociology at Griffith University in South East Queensland, Australia, and Beatle Wives: The Women the Men We Loved Fell in Love With by Marc Shapiro, author of more than sixty self-published celebrity biographies.
A Women’s History of the Beatles is a thorough examination of not only the lives of the women in the Beatles’ lives and the ways they inspired the “Fab Four” artistically, but an examination also of the complex interpersonal relationships that developed between the Beatles, the women and girls they knew, and women and girls in fandom spaces. Dr. Barrett’s research is extensive and interdisciplinary. She considers a variety of sources—many of which are by women who were Beatles fans in the 1960s and beyond—and contemplates the historical, social, sociological, and psychological impact of the Beatles on women and women on the Beatles.
While A Women’s History of the Beatles was more academic, Beatle Wives is just the opposite, focusing more on current pop culture interests. It also isn’t as good in my opinion as both a scholar and a fan of the Beatles and their wives. Much of Shapiro’s information comes from reprintings of reprintings (of reprintings of reprintings of...), often of misinformation or misconstrued information. His citations are often baffling (on more than one occasion, he cited Wattpad, a popular young adult fanfiction website). And while claiming to want to do the women he’s discussing justice by telling their previously untold stories, he frequently speaks about them in minimizing ways and repeats information which other writers have concluded are probably merely rumors based in sexism and, in the cases of Yoko Ono, May Pang, and Olivia Arias-Harrison, also racism.
Nevertheless, it seems that 2021 and the one-and-a-quarter years since have shown an increase in interest in a new lens through which to view Beatles history: women. As a women’s historian, and as I am writing a book about Maureen Starkey Tigrett (Ringo Starr’s first wife), this is a heartening thought. I look forward to whatever new stories and perspectives may arise as a result.
The Beatles: Get Back by